Consumerism and Human Agency
By Hector E. Garcia
Today’s erosion of democracy was significantly derived from a corruption of the meaning of citizenship. One of the main barriers to an optimal civic engagement of Americans began to be structured after WWII. It was a process, as described below, which would end up converting citizens more into consumers than educated members of a modern democracy.
Vance Packard, in The Waste Makers, quoted Ernest Dale, with the Graduate School of Business and Public Administration at Cornell University: “Marketing men across America are facing a fact that is hard for them to swallow. America’s capacity to produce may have outstripped its capacity to consume.” He cites the pleas by Victor Leblow and J. Walter Thompson for “forced consumption” and more “expensive consumption” to define the American way of life. Packard added, “…the pressures to expand production and consumption have forced Americans to create a hyperthyroid economy that can be sustained only by constant stimulation of the people and their leaders to be more prodigal with the nation’s resources.” Packard also reviewed the background of this forced consumption in his book The Hidden Persuader. President George W. Bush famously made clear the importance of the consumer role for Americans in his speech on the night of 9/11, exhorting the American people to “…go shopping…” Would it not have been more appropriate to recommend reflection and discussion of this revolutionary occurrence to citizens in the most advanced democracy? After another critical disaster nearly ten years later, U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner further validated the U.S. aspiration to turn as many people as possible into consumers. In his remarks on 1/12/11 at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies The Path Ahead for the U.S.-China Economic Relationship, regarding the recovery from the global recession of 2009, Secretary Geithner stated:
“SAIS is a leader in one of the most important challenges in public policy and education – that of helping Americans understand the world and the role we play in it… Our second objective is to promote reforms that will reduce China’s reliance on export led growth and encourages a shift to domestic consumption…”
Robert B. Cialdini, in his book Influence: Science and Practice, describes the power of marketers to pursue scientifically the goals established by Victor Leblow, J. Walter Thompson, and others. The book’s Introduction reads: “… each principle is examined as to its ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people, that is, a willingness to say yes without thinking first. The evidence suggests that the ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance more and more prevalent in the future…”
These are only two of many acknowledgements, and often praise, of the accepted use of science to manipulate our minds. Most disturbing is that the same strategy is used to manipulate children into being unquestioning consumers, as David Walsh explained in Selling Out America's Children: How America Puts Profits before Value — and What Parents Can Do”
A more recent threat to the educated citizenry that Thomas Jefferson and others considered essential to the endurance of democratic government has been the direct effort to make human agency in social, political, and economic affairs increasingly less relevant.
The believers in “The Machine” of the markets and the economy (such as Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and others in academia as well as reporters like Thomas Friedman) have consciously or unconsciously over the last several decades diminished the value of human agency probably because it is unpredictable and cannot be measured nor replicated at will. Human agency has been deemed less than necessary because technology, science, laws, money, and their abstract systems were assumed to be sufficient to maintain progress in economic and financial systems. To judge how accurate this assumption was, we need only look back to the havoc wreaked in the global financial system in 2008-09; even Fed Reserve Chairman Greenspan admitted the error of this theory before a public hearing in Congress.
No, the human agency factor is not a “soft value” to be dismissed condescendingly by the “masters of the universe” who created the illusionary economy of derivatives and lack of regulations. Long ago, there were wise observers who saw that such reductionism was mistaken and pointed the way back to American human values.
As Robert F. Kennedy stated in his March 18, 1968 speech at the University of Kansas:
And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Members of the American democracy are not meant to be detached observers and unquestioning consumers. We can take the baton of the Greatest Generation of Americans so that this “…new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…” continues to thrive. That generation was so named because they overcame the adversity of their time, the Great Depression and WWII, with a clear sense of their identity as Americans, a great deal of courage and self-sacrifice as well as the right type of American leadership.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.